The use of lights for functional and decorative purposes is wide spread throughout society. Small decorative lights used especially during the holidays around trees or other objects or surfaces are normally electrically connected in series and consist of hundreds of bulbs. These bulbs are wrapped around a multitude of various objects including trees or bushes, poles, along roof lines, gutters, gables, and many other objects or surfaces.
While the control of each individual bulb in such strings is not controllable on its own, it is common that each bulb may be turned on or off by using a switch inside each bulb that consists of a thin sheet of metal that bends when hot and thus can deactivate when hot and reactivate when cool. Other light actuation systems for string light such as that described by Hering et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 8,680,773 activate alternately using LED chips that activate based on the polarity of the alternating signal. Wang in U.S. Pat. No. 9,159,253 creates a visual effect by physically positioning the lights in a non-random fashion within a physical space. These systems rely on non-random placement of the bulbs to create patterns or the use of a simple on-off activation patterns.
The control of lights by using a coded visual signal in an exterior light is an alternative method to control the actuation of string lights such as described by Readler in U.S. Pat. No. 9,386,667. Kidakarn in U.S. Pat. No. 9,398,670 describes one or more strings of lights that are remotely controlled WiFi or Bluetooth protocol to an external device and further integrated with musical tones. Like Wang, Kidakarn also relies on non-randomly placed bulbs, for example in a holiday symbol.
The use of light emitting diodes in a string manner is also seen in the prior as described by Tveit in U.S. Pat. No. 8,944,632. Sylvania manufactures an LED light strip SYL-73661 that can tuned to various color. The strip does not allow for the selective activation based on the random placement of the LED strip as the entire strip is actuated. Sylvania also manufactures a single bulb termed a Smart Bulb A19 that can be controlled by an Apple I Phone and tuned to various colors. The control of hundreds of these individual bulbs to create a pattern would be an extremely laborious and difficult task to accomplish.